


The Lost World (short version)

by perverse_idyll



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, M/M, fairy tale influence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-21
Updated: 2013-03-21
Packaged: 2017-12-05 23:36:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/729180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perverse_idyll/pseuds/perverse_idyll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His son may have found the garden, but Harry's the one who keeps going back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lost World (short version)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Snapecase 2012. This is an abridged version of a longer story, but as I seem to be writing at a glacial pace these days, I figured it wouldn't hurt to post the original here.
> 
> Beta'd by Loupgarou.

***

The Forest in the late afternoon has the tint of both cathedral and graveyard about it. Grey-green. Morbid. Seething with magic.

It's Al's fault that Harry's lost, searching for the garden from which his son has been harvesting belladonna, datura, _amanita muscaria_. Al's head of house caught him sneaking back with the evidence stashed carelessly under his robes, and Owled a rather snippy request to Harry to contact her. The Forest is _Forbidden_ , no exceptions, and that goes double for the first Potter in generations to be sorted into Slytherin.

Harry Apparated to Hogwarts to look into the matter. Whoever—or whatever—is luring his younger son with promises of botanical poisons, he wants to be sure nothing fatal occurs.

Besides, it's not like he's doing anything in particular. He rarely is these days. It's been more than a year since he retired from the Auror corps. Longer since he's flown, since a malicious hex destroyed his rapport with a broom.

Al doesn't say exactly what he was doing or admit to getting lost, or to coming back with dubious potions ingredients packed in moss and wrapped in snakeskin in his pockets. "I found this path," he says, shrugging. "It led me to this garden. I didn't see or talk to anyone, Dad, I swear. I just took some cuttings, found stuff to keep them fresh, and got back in time for dinner." He plucks at his school tie and tries without success to sprout a halo. "Maybe whatever planted the garden isn't human and that's why I can't see it."

Harry rolls his eyes. "Yeah, that makes me feel so much better about you wandering around in the woods alone."

"Maybe," the boy blurts like a rabbit dashing from cover, "maybe it's Snape. Maybe that's where he used to grow potions ingredients, and he spelled it to take care of itself, and nobody's touched it since he died. Maybe the garden's glad another wizard's come along and—"

"It's not Snape," Harry says, annoyed. "You've got to stop dragging him in where he doesn't belong. It makes you sound mental."

For Merlin's sake. He wishes now he'd never explained to Al the significance of his middle name. The boy already gets teased for being gangly, shambling and speccy, and for smelling like an unwashed cauldron. The last thing he needs is a Snape fixation.

Besides, times have changed. Despite Harry's best efforts, Snape's left little trace. At war's end, during the chaos of grieving and mopping-up, someone nicked his corpse, so the Ministry allotted him a marker but no grave. Harry shudders to think where his bones lie now. His exploits and betrayals rate three meagre textbook paragraphs in the lengthy chapters on the Riddle Wars. His house at Spinner's End was finally repossessed once the local council got word that squatters were stripping it to the support beams. In the headmaster's office, the frame bearing his name enshrines a black canvas, utterly empty, as if painted over. To today's crop of kids, Snape is old news, a story long since ended, unreal.

Harry's aware (because Ginny's told him) that he spends too much time obsessing over the way Snape treated him and the secrets Snape kept, the whole fucked-up mess he found out about too late to resolve other than by accepting the bastard's sacrifice.

It's a rather useless pastime, regretting Snape. Not that Harry wastes much mental energy on bygones, or admits that he smuggles regrets about like pocketsful of poisonous harvest. Really, he has no idea what to do with all these purgative notions. He'd probably be here every week getting up in Snape's face if the git were still alive.

A nearby swish of movement over wet, dead leaves recalls him to his predicament, and he pauses, canvassing the area for landmarks, acromantulas, or cultivated beds of psychotropic plants. Two steps forward, and a spicy, wild odour overtakes him, a mocking incense as provocative as the rumours that have persisted for almost two decades: rumours of a corpse smuggled from the Shack, of potions brewed in dark bowers and an undead professor pacing the midnight halls.

Harry doesn't know what it is, but trusting his luck he plunges off after it, hoping the scent will guide him.

Nagging thoughts about his stagnant marriage, the depression of not being able to fly, fade in his wake. Feeling freer than he has in ages, Harry jaunts about, smiling at stray creatures that run away rather than smile back. A kaleidoscope of branches shifts overhead, gold-leafed greenish domes perforated with stray bits of sunlight. In the distance, a unicorn—no, make that a Thestral—whinnies.

Drilled to occasional caution, Harry charms his boots not to squelch or crunch. In passing he notes split hoofprints here, sharp claw prints there, sap bleeding from gnarled trunks, the fatal lace of rain-dropletted cobwebs stringing barren twigs together. The scent beckons him over a rotting log, past stands of nettles, around fungal excretions luminous in the rook-infested gloom. The birds jeer at him as he hikes by, then wing away in ones and twos as if to report his incompetence.

The usual jealousy barely registers, he's so accustomed to the cruel darts whenever he sees anything take flight. Ginny straddling her Firebolt, for example.

"Tell whoever—tell _Snape_ ," Harry feels idiotic and bold, calling the dead man's name into the silence, "to stop lurking about and produce this blasted garden. I haven't got all day."

Actually, he has. He could stay here for the rest of his life if he wanted.

He finally notices a faint, gleaming track winding through the ferns. Long, smooth S-curves slide through the mud. Harry hesitates, his senses sharpening in anticipation, then steps onto the path, alert for any presence not his own.

There's a moment of exorbitant clarity. The connection delivers a resuscitating shock to his nerves, as if he's completed a circuit by taking this step. He draws breath in perfect accord with the tumbled sky, the quivering intimations of magic. Whichever way he turns, the cool, vaulted canopy of the Forest looks identical, darkened tunnels of softly dripping trees endlessly mirrored, grottos of shadow, trunks branching like torsos hoisted up and hanging from the sky.

For some reason those elongated, overwrought knots bring Snape—Snape naked and shackled, his arms raised over his head—to mind. Harry stops, startled by whatever convolution in his brain projects such a disturbing image. It's the Forest, really; there's something moodily erotic about it, the dark wet wood, the mist that rises from leaves steaming in the sun. The impression of palpitating life crouched behind tangled foliage, watching him.

Without warning the trees open out, and sunlight blinds him. The path curves and ends at a wooden gate. Beyond a weathered fence that's more border than barrier, meticulous rows of herbs and beans and varieties of squash stretch into acreage, alongside mandrake root, devil's snare, damp mucky clumps of bulbous mushrooms.

"Hello?" Harry's astonished by the untouched bounty flourishing in the depths of the Forest. This isn't what he'd imagined when Al described a garden. "Anybody here?" He rests his hand on the rain-soaked gate, listens to the murmur of bees and inhales the faint stink of mulch. Now that he's arrived, the spicy odour seems to have vanished.

The gate opens at a touch. Suspicious, Harry slips through and lets it swing shut behind him.

He treads for a while amongst fresh and tender leaves, fruiting vines, the perpetual sensual exuberance of irrigated nature. His footprints sink in the fertilised soil. Al's right. There's a Sleeping Beauty quality to this garden, a trance of quietude, no sign of human life.

The sun is considerably lower, muffled in cloud, by the time he finishes his tour. The bees have retired, and only an occasional bird cheeps into the silence. On his way out, Harry spies a spray of tall, elegant flowers growing by the gate, a blend of iris and orchid, prismatic in the underwater light, the petals as electric as peacock feathers. Wand alert, he gazes around, weighing the options, then squats down and grips two waxy stems.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

Heart shrieking like a steam whistle, Harry hurtles upright. The murmur came from just over the fence, but bugger if he can see anything. Frantic, he jerks around, searching. A breeze strokes the nearest branches and they shiver. Nothing else.

"Snape?" he croaks.

That voice—fucking hell, he'd stake his life on that voice.

Silence. Harry swallows, trying to quell his adrenalin jitters, then yanks open the gate and prowls toward the treeline. "Snape," he demands of the shadows, wand flicking this way, that.

It drifts from his left, like a gust of wind on a hot, still day.

"So it's you, is it."

The soft spit and sizzle, as of grease hitting an iron skillet, taps an involuntary reflex in Harry. In the same way a mouth waters from hunger, his mind floods with memories. He can _taste_ the past, the hatred, humiliation, the desire for revenge. The ache inspired by irreparable tragedy. Flustered, he steps from drab sun into overwhelming shadow, spots of colour pulsing and fading as his eyes absorb the gloom. He looks around, breathless; looks again. No thin sneer lies in wait, no pale, baiting, embittered face.

"Potter."

Harry spins around, blurting, "You're alive," even though he doesn't know that yet. Snape says it back to him at the same moment, the same words, a faint hum like a bronze gong vibrating in the wind. Their voices reverberate in the echo chamber of encircling trees. For the first time in their lives, perhaps, they're in harmony.

A hippogriff screams in the distance, and the spell breaks. "Come out where I can see you."

"I'm neither a crup nor a criminal, Potter. I don't take kindly to being ordered around. Is there something you want, or are you merely a manifestation of my worst nightmares? I see no other reason for you to be here. The sooner you explain, the sooner the Forest will be quit of you."

Harry's mouth opens and closes as the word 'want' tangles his thoughts, and he remembers the erotic image prompted by the sight of the wet-boled, long-limbed trees: Snape naked, gnarled, hanging by his wrists. A dragonfly zips past, glinting electric blue, aiming for the sunshine.

"Bloody hell. Twenty years, and you're _alive_. All this time I—" He has no idea what he's about to say here, and hurriedly substitutes, "Why haven't you come back?"

"After 'all this time' it should be obvious that either I don't want to or I can't." The voice circles as it speaks, and Harry pivots, trying to follow. "What are you doing here? What is it you seek?"

Harry snorts. The things he could say to that. "My son," he begins.

"You have a son?" Merlin, the withering contempt.

"He found the garden." Harry pauses expectantly, but the voice doesn't react. "I thought it best to have a look, because he picked some—"

"Ah, yes," Snape murmurs. "I recall now. The dishevelled beanpole idling down the path, stinking of discontented youth, exuding a Potteresque air of entitlement and self-absorption."

It's mild by Snape's standards, but Harry spits back, "Wow, you could really smell all that? No wonder your nose is so bloody enormous."

A crack splits the air, abrupt as a gunshot. Harry scrambles back, swearing, as a branch pitches down. It crashes at his feet in a billow of snapping twigs. Standing back, breathing hard, he thinks wildly of Petunia and 'that awful boy,' his mum's sullen friend with his fits of wandless violence.

"I've spent twenty years free of your insolence," Snape growls. "I cannot otherwise explain my lapse in judgment. I find I have no desire to renew my acquaintance with it or you."

"For fuck's sake," Harry pants. "I just—" Bloody hell. He's going to royally bollocks this up. "Look, I'm sorry, all right? Insult me all you want, but lay off my kids." A desolate creak is his only answer. Harry frowns toward the garden, where the long gate knocks and wobbles against the frame. "Snape?" Picturing the git's insufferable face only intensifies his desire to see it. "Snape, don't go yet."

"What makes you think I'm going anywhere?" The voice keeps moving, evasive, insidious. "Let me remind you, Mr. Potter, which one of us is lost."

"Right," Harry says, levitating the fallen branch to one side, then spearing the nearest bush with his wand. He walks in a half-circle, repeating the procedure, getting splashed by runoff from shaken leaves. "Why are you hiding? Is it because you're—" He wipes his wet face and hesitates.

"Because I'm what? Disfigured?" Harry shrugs; he was going to say 'a ghost.' "And if the answer's yes? Do you intend to mock that, too?"

"Of course not." Frustrated, he strides across the clearing, spelling the bushes to part and bend. "I just want to see you." Snape has probably haunted the Forest for years. Harry's surprised by how much the idea pains him. "So what happened, then? After I— I mean, you— After the Shack?"

"What happened, Potter, is that I didn't die," Snape says with surprising directness. "I crawled out of that wretched place on my belly and bled out my life upon the Forest's floor. When I awoke, I was as I am now. I will continue in servitude, guarding and watching, until the day I fail to do as the Forest requires and it reclaims my life."

"So you're never coming back."

"I…" The voice fades, and Harry suddenly, fiercely wishes he hadn't asked. "No."

There's nothing to say to that. The finality of it aches, as if under his ribs something's pushing the bones outward. 

Then, for one extraordinary second, the whole wilderness flares up, and Harry sees. He sees Snape. Snape's standing in the gap where two branches divide, backlit by the sun dipping under the clouds. Snape, face ablaze, peering through the dense, geometrical shadows of his hair, his narrow body patterned by overlapping leaves. Harry walks forward, hand outstretched, and as he comes closer the optical illusion falls to pieces, dissolving into dappled bark and ragged outlines, sunlight brimming in pale, late-autumn blooms. It's not Snape after all, yet when Harry's fingertips enter the glow that mimics Snape's face, he touches the same depth of melancholy that darkens his future, the same loss that settled in his bones when he realised he'd never fly again.

"Is there anything I can do?" Beyond the interlaced boughs, the sunny garden shimmers, a separate world. "Anything to help?"

"Help?" The voice is bitter. "Not likely. But there is something you can do." The carpet of leaves rustles like a quilt being thrown back. "Potter. Let me touch you."

Harry's heart stamps once, hard, in his chest. It leaves an impression like a cleft hoofprint, the track of something dangerous running through.

"One touch."

He imagines his lit-up fingers finding Snape, Snape's pale hand emerging from inside his robes, subtle and quiet as a predatory snake. The knowledge that Al has walked here before him is suddenly unbearable. Magic will fuck you up; magic's not to be trusted. And Snape is a bastard, Harry knows this, Harry's visited his memories again and again, Harry's bloody well _wanked_ inside the bubble of Snape's past.

"And in exchange?" The sun dims; shadows thicken under his hand.

"You tell me. You still haven't—"

"Swear." He whirls, wand extended, cursing inwardly at sight of the empty clearing. Anxiety sparks through him, and the fallen branch just beyond his feet ignites. "Swear you'll stop luring my son into the Forest."

"I'd sooner lure a flobberworm, you trespassing half-wit. In point of fact," the voice turns sinuous, sly, "I'd sooner lure you."

"What?" Harry stiffens. "What did you just say?"

"I said," Snape hisses, "if you don't wish to be tempted, get the fuck out of my garden."

The crackling branch disintegrates in a wave of black smoke.

"Fine," Harry snarls, angry even though he brought it on himself. "Right. I'm out of here. Nice not seeing you, Snape. Guess I'll not-see you around, okay?"

"Coward," Snape says behind him, and Harry spins on his heel. If Snape is a ghost, casting 'Stupefy' won't work, but bugger if he wouldn't like a clear shot anyway. "A bargain, Potter," the voice rasps, only it comes from an entirely different direction. "One touch. I won't harm you, and I think you know that. You're just indulging your license to be difficult. All I want—" He trails off. "Perhaps it would be best not to go into that now. But proof."

"Of what?"

"Reality."

Harry snorts to cover the ironic pang this gives him. "For fuck's sake, I'm real. You only have to—"

"Not you, imbecile. Me."

His heart speeds up. Not a ghost, then.

The voice spirals closer, languid, insinuating. "Tell me, Potter, do you believe I'm real?"

Small bright spots fleck the ground at Harry's feet, shining like coins. Fairy gold, they vanish as another wave of cloud overpowers the sun. He pushes his fringe back from his forehead and doesn't answer.

"Very well. Since the strain of conversation is apparently too much for you, I'll keep it short. This, Mr. Potter, is what I propose. Roll up your sleeve, and I'll touch your forearm. In exchange, you may take whatever you want from the garden. After which the path will show you the way out."

Too irked to speak, Harry wrestles his sleeve above his elbow. He knows his face is flushed. Mutinous, he holds his arm out sideways.

"Now close your eyes."

"What the hell?" He backs up a step and retracts his arm against his ribcage. "In your dreams, Snape."

Silence. The wind blows. Cursing himself, Harry says, "Why?"

"Fuck you, Potter." The voice is somewhere to his right, circling, agitated. "Do you think I don't dream? I fucking well dream. I dream that I walk out of this Forest and back into the world." A sudden blast of wind makes Harry's shoulders hunch. Dead leaves swirl around him as if flying up a spout, flitter about like gold-winged insects, then clatter slantwise to the ground. "I dream I'm a man like any other," Snape whispers, "walking unchallenged."

"Yeah?" Harry clears his throat uncertainly. "Good for you, I guess. And when you wake up?"

The brief silence brings with it a sharp lowering of temperature. "I am myself again. There's the path, Potter. Take it."

The last words snarl away like unravelling rope. It's as if all the vitality in the Forest is in full retreat, drawing back from Harry, layers of shadow, of secrecy, of ancient magic being dragged off someplace he can't follow. The path ox-bows around him, offering escape.

"Wait!"

The silence drifts, expectant, but Harry doesn't speak again until the spicy scent rises inside the small clearing. Itching to lash out, he snaps, "Go for it, arsehole. Prove you're real."

Arm extended like a plank of wood, he squeezes his eyes shut.

If not for the odour of—whatever it is, capsicum and shagbark, spikenard, scorched leather, human sweat (which wasn't there before, and oh Merlin, Harry hates the weird rush of arousal it gives him), he'd wonder if he was actually standing alone in the Forest with his eyes closed, as gullible an idiot as ever lived. His skin prickles. He'd bet anything Snape is hovering behind him, noiseless, exhaling creepily against the back of his head, so close it's a wonder they're not already touching. The silence stretches, dazed, dark. Harry's anchor to the world fades second by second until it seems his feet barely touch the ground.

"Under no circumstances are you to open your eyes." Snape's murmur slips like a drug down his ear, along inner pathways of personal memory and repeated immersion in a life not his own; a life he thought had ended. "Don't," the voice catches, pain poking through the sneering façade like a bent nail. "Don't look at me."

Harry scowls with the effort it takes to keep his eyes shut. He has perfect recall of that moment even after twenty years, and he has to stand there in the dark, fending off the spray of blood, the gaunt agony and hoarse, haunting whisper. His arm trembles, and he says without meaning to, "Just touch me."

There's utter silence, no breathing, no crisping of dry leaves, no birds or blowing wind. The air is buzzy around him, static-electric. Harry wouldn't be surprised to hear a sudden ozone crack followed by sheets of rain. Then Snape's hand—what he imagines is Snape's hand—brushes his arm. It's as if the very tip of an arrow has grazed his skin, an inflammation, a faint aphrodisiac of divinity welting upward into loneliness. The burn of desire rushes in to fill this vacuum, like the heated kiss of glass suction drawing bad blood to the surface.

"For God's sake," Snape murmurs. "Are you always this lonely?"

Harry can barely breathe. He shakes his head, meaning, _You, not me,_ but he doubts the denial comes across. Snape's voice is rough, as if the impulse toward sympathy is an imposition he resents. The intimate disdain of it, rubbing on a subject Harry would rather not discuss, startles his pulse, sending short, spanking rushes of blood to his groin.

Something clasps his wrist. Harry's never thought about Snape's hands before—there were too many other peculiarities in Snape that took precedence. He does now. The fingers are supple and cool. He would gladly vouch for their reality; they are almost, at this moment, the _only_ reality.

Afloat in his off-kilter blindness, he says, "I'm sorry." The words quiver behind his eyelids, concepts softening into meaningless shapes and breaking apart like soggy bread.

"A Potter apologising? You must want something desperately."

"No, just—sorry I didn't save you."

"Don't be tedious," Snape huffs. His hand slides sensuously up Harry's forearm. "All this begging forgiveness—it changes nothing."

Harry swallows; his eyelids tremble but he holds them down by sheer force of will. "Snape." By standing behind him, Snape has made it impossible to reach Harry's wrist without leaning on him, without trailing his robes against Harry's shoulder. Each touch evokes trespass, a radiating web beaded with intensity. "Snape."

"You sound like a lamb bleating."

"When I died—"

Snape's fingers tighten, denting his skin. Harry adds, "I've never told anyone this before."

Snape pulls Harry's arm in until it's pressed against his heart, and Harry hitches himself backward until he comes to rest against something only slightly more yielding than a tree. How odd that Snape's body qualifies as a resting place. The creepy-crawly tickle of hair makes him shiver.

"Tell me." Snape's breath across his cheek reeks of woodsmoke.

Harry doesn't know why he's doing this. It's as if there's nothing else, nothing but the two of them standing together, the magic roused by making peace with this essential, inexorable part of his past binding them in a bizarre embrace.

Fist against his heart, Snape's fingers entwined around his pulse, he whispers, "I feel as if half my soul never came back. I've never been fully alive since then. Some part of me wanted the peace of being dead." He wonders if he should straighten up now, and feels an immediate pressure over his heart as Snape restrains him. "Nobody knows," he says. "I never let it stop me."

"When I was dying—" Snape says, and Harry's eyes start open. A swift hand douses them like flames, forcing the cross-piece of Harry's glasses up the bridge of his nose. "I looked for your mother in your eyes," Snape breathes, pressing blackness down over Harry's confusion. "I didn't find her. If I'd truly died, I doubt she would have been there. But you were, Potter." Harry squeezes his lids together, almost wincing. The hand stays where it is, both blindfold and caress. "You were there, and you saw me."

Intoxicating waves circulate through his body, giddier than blood. He might as well be lying flat with Snape as his mattress. They could even be floating in midair. It seems perfectly natural, in this unnatural state, to say, "I can't fly anymore, d'you know? I might never fly again. Brooms throw me off before I'm even seated. It's been two years now, Snape. I miss the sky so much I dream I'm falling out of it."

"Someone cursed you?"

Surprised he would care enough to ask, Harry lifts up. His head bumps something. Snape's nose? Bloody hell. It doesn't get much more real than that. "Two joyriders on a Muggle-pranking spree. Christ, it's so easy to lose things you never knew you could. I stuck it out for another year before resigning from the Aurors." He subsides again. "I've lost too much already."

The dark voice sneers, "That's the wizarding world, Potter. Magic giveth, and magic taketh away." One finger rubs back and forth at Harry's temple, admitting flashes of daylight. "However much I've lost—more than you, I'll wager—at least I can still fly. I don't even need a broom. If you behave, maybe I'll take you with me someday."

Harry frowns. Trust the bastard to taunt him for confiding a weakness.

"I might even," Snape's teeth skim his ear, "let you ride me."

Startled out of his confessional trance, Harry jerks upright, but he doesn't get far. The hand across his eyes grips harder and drags his head back, stretching his neck at a vulnerable angle. A leaf shuffles down onto his mouth, and he almost panics.

The leaf vanishes with a breath. Under a downpour of hair, amidst the fragrance of burnt wood, Snape kisses him. Harry stops pretending he hasn't been waiting for this, and kisses him back.

Contrary to assumptions based on the way he ordinarily wields it, Snape's tongue isn't thin or sharp or forked. He pulls Harry sideways, nearly gouging an eye out. In the darkness that magnifies every sensation, his mouth is a ripe smear of goblin fruit, a consuming ambush, not teasing, _taking_ , teeth adding a savage edge to the act. Harry struggles in his grasp, not to escape but to get his arms around the bastard. He wants to harness Snape's body with both hands, hold him to the real world, straddle his unghostly human warmth, his fevered incarnation of thwarted love. His prick rises, unruly as a broom between his legs.

With a grunt of furious longing, Snape forces him to be still, pulling his tongue out and driving it back in, the kind of tongue-fucking Harry's never had before. Desire shocks painfully up his legs, throbbing deep as a battered gong, the singing, spreading, groin-shivering resonance making his nipples pucker, his cock pulse.

He hates this. He wants this. He's always known his feelings for Ginny fall short of tempestuous romance. It's never been an issue, because Harry stopped believing in passion long ago. Maybe never believed. Not because of Ginny. He just doesn't have it in him, and he expects someday she'll decide, "Enough." Because it's not. Not enough. Family comes first, but his is almost grown. And the lust of a rutting, elusive Snape resurrects all the wordless yearning he once nurtured as a boy, the promise of completion for which his code word used to be 'family.' But there's something missing between him and Ginny, something they compensate for in different ways. Something even the children can sense.

Especially Al. Al's always been clear he'll never settle for that.

As if reading his mind, Snape places his hot, damp lips against Harry's ear and says, "Your son followed you, Potter."

"What?" Horrified, Harry doubles over, trying to buck Snape off.

"Spare me your hysterics. The path led him in circles, but he's started calling for you." Harry can't get his wand in position, so he rams his elbow back. In retaliation, Snape shoves him, hard. "Take your brat and get out."

Daylight scalds Harry's eyes, his pupils contracting so sharply he can't see. He blinks, disoriented, and by the time he staggers around, the clearing is calm and smells of nothing but rotting leaves.

"Arsehole," he says on a heaving breath, and wipes his mouth. He's shaky from his body's confused signals, dizzied by a hammering sense of shame.

With one last glance at the garden, he pounds off down the path. Al hears him coming and turns, wand uncertain. "Dad!"

"You shouldn't be here," Harry gasps, grabbing the boy's arm and hustling him onward.

"Did you find it?" Al demands. Harry nods, touching his mouth self-consciously as they fall into step, brushing through the ferns and sending lizards scuttling into the underbrush. Al's face mottles strangely at his silence. "Anyone there?"

Rather than lie out loud, Harry shrugs.

At the castle, Al stops him from coming in. "I found it first, Dad. Remember that." Then he's up the steps and through the doors without saying goodbye.

***

Week after week the garden beckons, and Harry resists. But never for long. The garden and Snape's mouth. Snape's mouth and his hands, his undomesticated scent, his restless, whispered reminiscence. For weeks on end, Snape's loneliness plagues Harry, assaulting him at the strangest moments. He's obsessed with the yearning to see his former professor in the flesh, to lead him out of the woods and back into the world. Snape is sixty years old. Hasn't he atoned enough?

Knowing the danger of going back, of going too far, he submits anyway. Life with Ginny is a quick kiss on the lips; Snape offers the temptation of sucking a flame into his mouth so he can experience what it's like to burn inside.

"You're back." Always the mocking voice circles him, mingling with the hush of leaves. "Close your eyes," and Harry does. "Don't look," and he slips his glasses off, inviting the cool, controlling hand to bring down the darkness.

One day, arriving early, he braces himself against the fence, pulls a black strip of silk from his pocket, and binds his eyes, inhaling the aphrodisiac fragrance blowing hot and cold around him. "Snape," he calls, and waits, robes rippling around his ankles.

The gate creaks. Agile fingers explore the snugness of the blindfold.

"Stop calling attention to yourself," Snape murmurs. "You'd be sorry if some other creature found you before I did. If you can't control your desire to be fucked up the arse, better send your son."

"Shut it," Harry says, convinced Snape uses innuendo about Al to stir him up. He reaches out, imperious and blind. "And since you know what it takes to—" He blurts out a totally unintended, "Fuck," as his hands blunder into unforeseen flesh. He grips, first startled, then eager, then trembling with sensation, endless sliding soft skeletal contours, tickly chest hair, almost undetectable nipples that tighten under his scraping thumbs. Oh God, why didn't he think of this sooner. He almost chokes on the erotic absurdity. Primed with the illicit pleasure of black silk, his cock bulges. Snape is standing before him, a foreign landscape of endless skin, sinews and protrusions, smooth bony slopes that warm to the sweat on Harry's fingers.

Then his mouth catches Harry's like a snake striking, a quick hard bite and lightning withdrawal.

Harry opens his arms.

They tangle front to front for the first time since he found the garden. His need is frantic, guilty, testing and intuiting the astonishing fact of Snape's physical existence, the pale, unbelievable body glowing awkwardly under the spring sun. He clutches, pulls, pinches, scratches as Snape thrusts him roughly against the fence rail. They kiss with a wildness that terrifies Harry, because if this is passion it means being totally out of control, ravenous and spinning in the vulnerable dark, two predators tearing all modesty, all rationality, all prior loyalties to pieces. Then Snape drags his mouth away, and Harry's face is wet and aching because they slavered in their haste, the sheer frenzy of breaking a sexual famine. He hadn't known he was starving. He hadn't known this was what starving felt like, or that he could _take_ like this, 'this' being the welts he's left on Snape's back, on his small but surprisingly tight arse.

Harry runs a hand down, cupping, tracing the tender inflammations, inflicting more. His other hand sneaks forward. In a shock of wobbly softness he's got Snape's bollocks, yielding and velvety in their loose sac, and holy fuck, the way they spread gently, overlapping in Harry's cradling palm, the tangle of pubic hair rubbing like wool along his knuckles—Harry nearly comes in an upwelling of desperate happiness, of inhibitions burnt away in the heat of surrender.

Then Snape takes Harry's face between his hands and kisses his scar, open-mouthed, sucking, stopping suddenly to breathe, "I'll have you."

Desire whips Harry's groin, furrowing the surface of his deepest fantasies, as if Snape has placed his lips directly on Harry's heart and bitten him back to life. A crowd of sensations swarms its way down his body, rubbing and mouthing and digging its nails in, as Snape makes sure Harry feels every inch of his descent. Arching back, sun beating the silk blindfold to a sea of black shimmers, Harry grips the fence rail so fiercely he drives splinters into his palms. Snape sets his teeth into the crotch of Harry's trousers, huffing through his nostrils and working his jaw back and forth. The sharp pinch deepens until it's almost intolerable. Harry shakes and swears and Snape finally claws his flies open, his long fingers strapping the thick, curved flesh inside, squeezing and massaging before he finally yanks Harry's cock out.

By the time Snape's finished blowing him, Harry's anchorless and afloat in a private world of sweat-soaked, sunspotted, pitchblack bliss. He's so boneless and insensible of his surroundings, still gasping, still groggy with the onslaught of helpless emotion and liquefying pleasure, that it makes perfect sense when a supple, rippling ring of magic coils up his body and lifts him off his feet. Since he's forgotten where his feet are, it doesn't even matter.

The magic bears him forward. Harry lies passive with pleasure, letting go, his trousers around his ankles and the sun blazing on his sticky thighs, his drying prick. Air wafts over his face, and he feels himself being lowered, laid carefully on the ground. Stripped of all layers, he dissolves, limbs outspread, toes and fingers distended. At the furthest stretch, he relaxes, reaching out with his senses, soaking up the fragrance of ripe plantings, pungent herbs, the rich, heady, poisonous fragrance he associates with Snape. Against his eyelids the blindfold burns, but he leaves it there, loving the freedom of drifting through a dark universe of sensual repose.

He wakes wind-chilled, calm but slightly hollow under the surface, aware of imminent loss, a sense that nothing can stay this perfect for long. Sitting up, he peels back the blindfold like a pirate's eye-patch, squinting against the mellow, low-slanting sun, and is confronted by the sight of his glasses perched on a small, obvious pumpkin.

"Very funny," he grumbles, snatching them up.

The real world becomes alarmingly visible. Standing, Harry dusts off his bum, spells himself clean, and starts exploring to find out what's become of his clothes. The hybrid flowers stand as high as his waist, splendidly profuse, a luminescent, powdery sheen reflecting off the gateposts. Over the rail hang his trousers, and his shoes are lined up pointing toward the exit.

The moment he steps out of the Forest onto Hogwarts grounds, a robe-wrapped black chrysalis unfolds from the grass, wand in hand. "See anyone this time?" it says, and Harry Occludes at once, perturbed by his middle child's persistence. When he doesn't answer, Al complains, "If I can't go back, then neither should you." He turns with a practised swirl of robes and trudges off.

After that, Harry's hunger for Snape gets out of hand. It doesn't help that the bastard refuses to fuck him, which really oughtn't to matter, except that his heightened receptivity under the blindfold has created a constant state of incipient arousal. He wants Snape inside him, around him, the full glut of sensory overload, the experience of penetration combined with a possessive, enveloping embrace.

The thing is, Snape doesn't trust him. Sometimes he tells Harry to forget the black silk and just follow the path. Harry learns not to argue; on those days Snape leads him from one wonder of the Forest to the next: duelling unicorns and paradisical flowers, hippogriffs giving birth, crystalline waterfalls splashing into divinatory pools like giant Pensieves. He watches bejewelled insects shed opalline shells. Every venomous creature that slithers, flies, or crawls seems to be at Snape's beck and call. One day he accompanies Harry through all four seasons, the trees around them brightening, flaming, dying, frost riming the path, flowers multiplying underfoot. The beauty and strangeness Snape shows him revive a sense of wonder, reminding Harry that the world is magical in ways he's almost forgotten.

But he still wants to see Snape, and Snape says no.

From behind the safety of the blindfold, Harry murmurs, "Why am I doing this? I shouldn't. It's not anything I've ever wanted. 'Wanting' means a normal life, right? Family. People loving each other. Taking care of each other. Staying faithful. I got what I wanted. For twenty years it's been perfect. Why isn't it enough?" He gasps suddenly, " _Fuck_. Don't stop. But don't bite me again or I'll—"

"Possibly what's got into you, Potter," Snape sneers against his hip, "is middle age." He undulates, tongue sipping at Harry's navel. "But more likely magic. There's room for strangeness in you, and having tasted strangeness you appear to want more."

Naked in the garden, with Snape between his legs and a blindfold around his eyes, Harry's in no position to argue. Snape rises to kneel over his face, and Harry keeps his hands flat at his sides, fisting the grass; Snape's right not to trust him.

"It's my opinion you've never been as ordinary as you claim," Snape goes on, blocking out the sun, stubbing his erection against Harry's open mouth. "You've merely deceived yourself in order to live out a childhood dream." He moves with the strange fluidity the Forest has granted him, and semen paints Harry's lips. "I could conceivably be wrong about this, since I've never wanted to be ordinary."

"Well, congratulations, you—"

Snape silences him with a thrust.

Later, inspired, Harry rolls over and grabs his arm, feeling a tough, uncanny resilience, an inhuman texture, slither under his hand. He wonders if he's touched the Dark Mark, but Snape merely pulls away without threat.

"The gamekeeper's hut," Harry announces. Brilliant. "Since Hagrid retired, no one uses it anymore. They all prefer to stay in the castle." He tugs at the blindfold, wanting to see what Snape's thinking. Sinewy fingers haul him forward and twist his arm behind his back.

"So you propose we meet there. I could," Snape whispers, holding his arm bent back to the verge of pain, and maybe a tiny bit beyond. "Hogwarts is part of the Forest, after all."

Harry's always thought it was the other way around. "We can seal the windows. Cover everything up, make sure no light gets in." He leans away from the pain, and Snape lets go. "We could have a bed. It would be too dark to see, and we could—"

"I could fuck you," Snape purrs, "without fear of your blindfold slipping. But this is your show, Potter. Shall I leave the arrangements to you?"

Hearing the unspoken question of trust, Harry protests, "You should know by now, I'd never do anything to hurt you."

Behind him Snape uncoils, noiseless. His voice hovers overhead. For a second Harry hates the strip of silk that divides them. "Yet another difference between a Gryffindor and a Slytherin." Harry sits up, groping, but Snape's no longer within reach. In fact his voice seems to be rising higher. "Slytherins generally know when they're lying."

Right. Harry remembers: the bastard can fly. He tilts his blind head back. "That's a load of shite. I don't—"

"When was the last time you and your wife talked, Potter?" The voice is faint and far away, a departing hiss.

Harry scrambles to his feet and rips away the silk, but the sky is shining, uninvolved, and he's alone in a flourishing, treacherous garden. His heart sinks, and for the first time since this started, he doubts his sanity.

He stumbles onto the Hogwarts grounds, unsurprised to find Al pacing the Forest's verge. The surprise comes when his son grabs him and shouts, "Dad, listen to me. Stay away from him. He's not human, do you hear me? Not human." Harry gapes at him, frozen with the need to deny and worried about what Al knows, and how much. The boy snarls, high-pitched, "And he's not yours," before sprinting off across the green, his student robes flapping like insufficient wings.

That evening Ginny confronts him in his office. "Al Firecalled me. About what you're doing."

Harry fingers the bite on his trousered hip. "Exploring the Forest, you mean?"

"I mean seeing someone." She sips her wine and scrutinises him sharply. "Who is it, Harry?"

"I'm not. I haven't." He barks a short laugh. "There's no one to see."

Ginny flicks her wand, and a silver salver leaps in front of him, transfigured into a mirror. Harry stares at his bruised lips and uncombed hair, his eyes flamboyant and feverish with self-absorbed dreams.

"Who do you see, Harry? Is that really you? I don't think so."

It is, but he banishes the mirror anyway. "I don't know, Gin." Guilt sinks inside him like a cold stone, a premonition of drowning. Merlin, don't let him lose his family. "But I'll find out. You're right. I need to take a serious look at what I'm doing."

He hopes Snape doesn't kill him for this.

***

Harry steps inside and shuts the door. Blackness swallows him. Right, so that works. He'd been here earlier, clearing things out of the way so he wouldn't trip over them, doublechecking that his spells for blacking out the windows and sealing the door admit no bright lines or ambient light. It's already dusk. They shouldn't be interrupted.

Reminders of Hagrid still clutter every corner of the hut. Harry thinks he even detects a whiff of unwashed dog lingering in the throw pillows, but the smell of a cold hearth reigns supreme. The mustiness suggests cobwebs. It's a melancholy place for a passionate coupling, but perfect for self-flagellating infidelity.

He treads carefully across the floorboards, stripping off his shirt as he inches forward, straining his ears for telltale signs of Snape's presence.

It's the scent, of course, that gives him away. "Potter." Snape speaks with his usual mocking softness, but in an enclosed space his voice carries with eerie distinction. "That's the sloppiest striptease I've ever seen."

"Bugger off," Harry says, breathless, even though he'd been expecting it. Then, "Wait. You can see in the dark?"

The long hands alight with no warning on his back, skimming, stroking over his shoulders. They trace upward to his ears and relieve him of his glasses. Each touch lands with astonishing confidence, so yeah, Snape can see. Strangely, he's arrived for this rendezvous fully clothed, as if being inside four walls has made him revert to his previous practice of overdressing. Harry's outstretched hands map a barricade of layers. Since that moment at the fence, nakedness has been the rule, and Snape's desire to cover himself up now makes Harry uneasy.

He stumbles, so Snape guides him to the bed in the pitch dark, grips the back of his head, sucks his tongue roughly, and shoves him down.

Harry almost calls it off. Regret cramps his belly through the whole surreal experience of being sucked, fingered, impaled, taken over. His whole reason for being here is undermined by grief. He knows what he needs to do, agrees it's the right thing, yet he's increasingly afraid the one he's being faithless to is Snape. Ginny's upset, yes, but betraying Snape means crossing magic, and magic can kill you.

Harry rocks and grunts and cries out into the mattress ticking, bent in half, fucked almost out of his mind by a greasy prick in thick, flapping robes, the soft material burying him under folds of blackness in an already black room. The obscene sounds his arse makes under Snape's assault, the ragged, sobbing breaths that fill his ears, the frenzy with which Snape inhabits him, plunging and bucking and crawling on his knees—Harry wishes he could see, oh he wishes he could summon light and that the fucking would never stop.

He claws Snape down on top of him, and they both come, it's inevitable, the bedframe knocking and squeaking, the blackness as tangible as Snape's famished hands. Harry embarrasses himself by shouting and curling up as if he's been gut-punched, grinding his sweaty forehead against Snape's mouth. Then he flops back, throat raw, waves of trembling radiating outward from the guilt in his stomach, from the obliterating ecstasy of groin and arse spasming in unison. Snape shudders atop him, smelling of the Forest, of growing things and dead things and iridescence and retribution. His flowing robes bestow an illusion of comfort, warm as the blanket under which they'll never sleep.

Harry summons his glasses and stares into the darkness. Then he reaches out, picks up his wand, and whispers, " _Lumos_."

Snape's off the bed in a flash, not scrambling, but in a single sinuous leap. " _Incendio_!" Harry shouts. The logs in the fireplace spit; the lamps and candles flare. Gold ricochets around the room, and for a moment Harry's conscience shrinks from the light of childhood memories.

He swings his legs off the bed, and they wobble so much he can barely support his own weight. There are marks on his body, and spunk oozing down his thighs. He aims his wand at the back of the figure with the stringy black hair.

"Snape," he croaks. "Look at me."

The figure turns in unearthly silence, his robes not even rippling, and—well, Harry's weirdly disappointed. All his exaggerated memories of Snape dwindle down to this one thin, unattractive specimen. Snape stands rigid, appalled, a glare gathering in his eyes and the corners of his mouth, gold dancing in his hair, yellowing his drawn, unyielding features.

He looks furious and afraid and no older than Harry. He was thirty-eight when he died; he's thirty-eight now. His compressed lips are ruddy with kissing, with bristle-burn from Harry's unshaven face, and a rumpled curtain of hair nearly covers his eyes. He looks much too young, worn to a frazzle, and—strange, this—not the least bit intimidating.

Inside Harry, a page turns and rewrites history.

 _He's human. Oh Merlin, he's human,_ and a sense of astonishment unfurls with the same surprised rush he'd felt sitting his first time on a broom, elated but knowing he was about to be sent skyrocketing into freedom; that the world was about to be changed forever. 

His brief joy evaporates as Snape's black robes start falling away, turning to strips of snakeskin. In the dozen splashes of firelight his body elongates, his sallow skin vanishing under a shining set of scales, rushing down his sides like ripples down a stream, black patterned on black. Only his eyes remain unchanged, riveted on Harry.

"I should have known I couldn't trust you," hisses the apparition. "That you would never allow me to be human."

The snake's wings unfold, gossamer, ethereal, things more of spirit than flesh. The door bangs open to let in the night air.

"Wait," Harry says, taking a step forward. "Don't go."

The serpent's sleek head turns. "You broke the rules," it whispers. Why hadn't Harry realised they were speaking in Parseltongue? "I must not be seen as I truly am. The mistake is yours, but I'm the one who will suffer." It hesitates, swaying. "I would stay if I could. I would be human again. Whatever the cost."

"Then stay," Harry says, and spells the door shut.

Snape says, "I am bound—" but his protests whisper to sibilance when Harry steps forward and embraces Snape's ugliness, Snape's unwilling resemblance to what should have killed him.

Its scales are slick and cold, flexible as vinyl, and the back-and-forth weave of its body disturbs him. He clears his throat. "Be human. I'll help you. Whatever it takes."

The snake twists fretfully in his arms. "Potter, don't you ever tire of playing the hero?"

"You're human, damn it," Harry snaps. "You are. A sorry excuse for humanity, maybe, but that doesn't give the Forest the right to hold you prisoner. Let me help you, Snape. Tell me what to do."

"You're doing it," Snape says, his serpent tongue restlessly testing the air. "Hold onto me. Whatever happens, don't let go."

Harry closes his eyes. It's easier to imagine Snape speaking to him when he can't actually see what Snape has become. "All right, I can do that. For how long?"

"Until dawn. Or the Forest reclaims me. Be warned, I'll do everything I can to throw you off." A shudder ripples the length of Snape's body and down Harry's side. "Don't let me. For God's sake, I don't even care if I survive this. Please, Potter. I'd rather die human."

"Shut up," Harry says, teeth gritted against the revulsion the snakeskin inspires. "I've got it. No letting go. And for the record, no dying."

"I never thought I'd be so grateful for your stubbornness," Snape gasps, and coils suddenly into the air. Startled, Harry grips his scales, hands slipping on the flexing abdomen. The serpent's body feels like one long muscle pouring through his arms. The muscle thrashes, hoisting Harry off his feet. Cripes. This is going to be a nightmare.

The snake writhes, frantic, knotting and unknotting from rafter to wall. Dangerously limber, it wields its body like a bullwhip, lashing, hissing, drawing its head back to strike. Harry curses and stumbles and they spill to the floor, kicking and crashing everywhere. Chair legs crack. Candles topple. Hot wax splatters Harry's face, and he shouts a spell to smother the dripping flames. Battered by his heart, he embraces the snake with both arms, hooks one leg around it, then the other, clamping on and rolling over and doing his best not to hurt it. The snake bumps and bruises without mercy but fails to bite.

Then from one second to the next, he's got an armful of skinny, distraught teenager in threadbare black, mad as a wet cat and raging like a dragon. Under other circumstances Harry might enjoy pitting his strength against a young Snape, but the figure's head turns, and Harry finds himself face to face with a white mask. Snape's vicious glare burns through the stylized eye slits. Overhead a shadowy effluvium condenses into a skull and snake, wavering in and out of existence. "Shite," Harry spits, and wrenches Snape closer.

The adolescent Death Eater fades to a shimmer, a creature of pure light, and Harry nearly panics trying to figure out how to hold a Patronus. He cradles what feels like nothing at all, a sweet, fleeting blend of smoke and happiness. The silver doe dissolves, and for a moment Harry fears it's taken Snape with it.

"Stay with me," Harry mutters. "Come on, you bastard, stay with me."

Instantly the snake's back, catching him off guard and almost slithering away. Harry lets it drag him, his bare skin scraping over the floorboards, before he manages to anchor himself around the iron leg of the woodstove. The snake doubles back, and the next thing Harry knows he's wearing it from neck to ankle, swallowed in its coils. The slick slide of reptilian skin is nauseating. It squeezes, and he wrestles it across the rug, and they thump repeatedly against a wall, blow after blow. Harry keeps his head down and grimly rides out the spasms.

Finally the long body ripples and falls still. Harry lies atop it panting, worn out, wary of jumping to conclusions but praying to anything that will listen that it's over. How long have they been at it? It can't possibly be morning. The scales under him gradually soften to cloth, and Snape's in his arms, lying quietly on the floor. Giddy, exhausted, Harry relaxes his stranglehold and rests his face against Snape's greasy hair.

Not greasy. Sticky.

Oh God. He knows that smell.

Fuck this. No, really, fuck this. It's so fucking unfair. He's collapsed on Snape's limp body, Snape's corpse with its torn-open throat, blood soaking the rug, creeping down his robes, pooling in his hair, a dead Snape who stares through Harry as if he's a window onto another world. Harry's older now than Snape was when he died, and he'd rather be bruised and bashed against walls than watch Snape die again.

Maybe it's just another transformation. Or maybe this is Harry's betrayal carried out to its logical end.

Then Snape jerks, squirming, lengthening, lunging upward, and it's a terrible relief, no matter that it means the cycle's starting all over again, hours of it, never mind that Harry's not even sure how much longer he can keep this up.

The night passes, an eternity of grappling, of Harry blocking Snape's every attempt to escape. In a bleary moment he remembers the black-out spells, and mumbles, " _Finite Incantatem_." The windows rise grey and ghostly from the background, pale with unkept promise. The snake lies palpitating, Harry coiled around him. They're both sluggish, exhausted, all the strength wrung out of them. Harry's arms, locked for so long around one thing or another, have gone completely numb.

They struggle on, and on. The shadows lighten with great subtlety, as if the morning is a creeping secret. All the shapes in the room emerge blunted with charcoal.

As Snape bleeds to death one final time, the glass panes of the hut flame orange-gold, bordered with sun, as brilliant as if the house is burning. Harry blinks tears from his eyes and blots them on Snape's robes.

By now he can barely crawl, but he forces himself, humping the short distance up Snape's body to comb the bloody hair back from his empty face and kiss his cold forehead, waiting for life to return to Snape's eyes. Sunlight streams across the far wall. He feels an invisible pressure rise to the ceiling and recede, the weight of magic dispersing through the walls.

Beneath him, Snape's chest expands.

Dreaming of black silk across his eyes, Harry aches and floats in suspended awareness, seeing no reason to ever move again.

"Potter," Snape's entirely human voice growls into his neck. "Get off me."

Finally, finally, Harry allows himself to let go and falls off Snape onto the floor, muscles screaming, joints stiff. They lie side by side as light gilds the rafters and illumines the shambles they've made of the room. There's blood all over the place, but right now it's not important.

Dozing and drifting, Harry starts when Snape wonders aloud, "Am I human? Can you see me?"

He pries his eyes open and manages to turn his head, even though his neck twangs. "Yes."

"Are you sure? Touch me," Snape says, his uncertainty bringing Harry fully awake. Shifting sideways, he reaches out. First Snape's face, then he works Snape's collar buttons loose and strokes his throat.

Snape shivers, and Harry traces the vibrations down every moment to where his marriage will inevitably end. He chokes, "You're alive."

"Am I? I don't feel real," Snape whispers back. "Am I truly human, Potter? I can't tell anymore."

Harry painstakingly unbuttons the rest of Snape's shirt and sticks his hand underneath. He's not prepared for the sense of reverence that wells up inside him at the feel of Snape's heartbeat, so he manages in Parseltongue, "Do you feel this?"

A frown flits across Snape's brow. Harry repeats the question, hissing the words, and Snape says, "Speak English, idiot. I don't understand you."

Harry smiles and presses his head to Snape's armpit. "Because you're not a snake." He continues exploring, closing his eyes occasionally to compare a moment against his blindfolded memory, matching sensation to sight; and what had been an ordeal, one of the longest nights of his life, narrows down to this simple, magical act. "Guess what? You have nipples. Snakes don't have those. Hey, and chest hair. And a fucking lot of bones for a man your age. And no offence, but you look—" _Amazing. Alive._ "Like shite." He swallows, defenceless against the tenderness that keeps surging inside him, quaking, subterranean. Using Snape's body as his centre of gravity, he steadies himself.

"You don't see a snake, then?" Snape insists, like a child too tired to stop whining and fall asleep.

Harry levers himself up and leans forward. "I told you, the spell's broken."

"As if that matters," Snape scoffs. His face is marble-white, like a funerary statue, but the intimacy of sharing a terrible experience seems to have loosened his tongue. "People see me as a snake. They always have. Albus certainly did. I used to be proud of it. I used to gloat over my lack of common humanity. I thought if I could be elusive and cold-blooded, I'd be better off. If I could be deadly." He expels a shuddering breath. "Potter. Tell me what you see."

"I'd do a better job of it if you'd let me take your clothes off. Do you mind?"

"After you've overcome every one of my pathetic disguises? I'm hardly going to insist on modesty now."

"No, I mean." Harry places one hand on Snape's narrow belly so it can rise and fall with every breath, participating silently in Snape's existence. "Will you let me prove to you you're human? Like you were before. Because I saw you, you know. Before the snake took over."

"You're not suggesting we have sex, are you?" Snape finally meets his eyes with a disbelieving glare. "Potter, if being flung against walls by a berserk reptile is what turns you on, I want nothing more to do with you."

Harry snorts. "Just let me take care of you, okay?" Refusing to admit how much he hurts—all fucking over, to be honest—Harry staggers to his feet. When he picks up his wand, Snape immediately snaps, "No levitating."

That prolongs the issue of getting Snape off the floor and into the bed. He's as slippery as a snake from sheer weakness, lurching and swaying, furious with himself and Harry each time his legs give out.

Harry's just got him properly onto the mattress when someone knocks sharply at the window.

They're both struck still, and Snape squirms to sit up, propping himself with fragile dignity against the wall. Harry takes a deep breath and turns, just as an owl pecks the glass again.

Relieved, he goes to let it in. Behind him, Snape says, "Don't open the window." Harry hesitates. "Potter, don't."

"It's just an owl," Harry tells him, and unhooks the latch. The bird swoops to a chair and extends its leg.

"Potter."

Waving him to wait, Harry unfurls the parchment and studies it, frowning.

"Don't go," Snape whispers before Harry even knows what he plans to do.

"I—" Harry looks up, alarmed, stares around him, faces Snape with growing horror. "I have to. Fuck. What am I doing here? My kids. Al. Snape, I'm sorry, I'll be back as soon as possible, I promise. But I—" He dashes around the room, scrambling awkwardly into his clothes, hopping and twisting, the parchment crushed in one hand. "I can't wait. If I don't go now, I'm afraid of what might happen."

"May I read it?" Snape says quietly. Shaking with impatience, Harry smoothes the page and holds it out, snatching it back when it seems Snape might reach for it. "I see." Snape stares at the sunlight streaming across the floor, lips pinched, face inscrutable. "Very well, then. Leave me, Potter."

Harry flings open the door, grimacing when his muscles complain. Brilliance hits him in the face, a river of gold that sweeps his shadow behind him. The outdoor air smells spicy, glorious. He blinks at the dazzling garden surrounding the house, and says, "Snape. It's all right. You'll be protected now. Your garden's here."

Behind him, Snape hisses, "Just go, you stupid bastard," and Harry turns, offended, and for a moment forgets how urgent it is that he get home right now, that he be by his children's side. Snape sits on the mattress, legs tucked under and his back to the wall, bundled up to his chin in blackness. His bloodstained hair frames his beaky face, and his eyes stare out, despondent. Harry thinks in wonder, _I remember that face_. The sunlight has made it as far as the bed, and Snape's patterned with gold, his skin ablaze, a bright spot amidst contrasting blackness.

Harry almost goes to him. He wants to. But he can't. Delay would be inexcusable. His children need him. Besides, he's afraid that if he walks over there Snape will simply melt away, a whorled knot hidden in the wooden planks, a reflection in a mirror, the way he was in the forest, all mimicry and misdirection, more illusion than man. Harry doesn't think he could bear that right now. Just looking at him there, alone, crushes him with loss, the loneliness they both exude, that each accuses the other of suffering. Harry tells himself that if he reaches for Snape now and encounters only a figment of his imagination, his heart will break.

So he can't. He has to go. He looks down at the scroll crumpled in his fist and steps outside.

Through the open door behind him washes a soft, deep vibration, reminiscent of something swinging in the wind. "Goodbye, Mr. Potter. May we meet again someday."

That can't be right. Harry hurries through the garden, sweating with anxiety. Surely he misheard. Well, never mind. His kids are what's important here. He'll explain when he gets back. Not that there's really any reason to go back. He brushes his free hand across the flowers proliferating alongside the path, a garden of living prisms, bright as a lie. Then he steps onto the grass beyond, recovers his balance, and starts to run. His kids need him. The parchment proves it. The same parchment he can't seem to let go of, even though there's nothing on it, no words, no message. It doesn't matter. As long as he doesn't let go, he hears Al's voice, demanding, "Dad, come home. Right now. We need you here."

Harry picks up the pace, wishing he could fly, while the Forest shrinks to a memory, proof that magic shouldn't be trusted. He never needs to go there again, because—well, he doesn't know how to say this, but he lost the garden. Not that it ever really existed in the first place. But he lost it, whatever it was.

At least he still has his family. At least that.

He glances back once, startled by the violent colour rippling in waves outside the gamekeeper's hut. Stupid not to have picked a few flowers while he was at it. Whatever he was at. Well, too late now. The sight of the vines coiling up the walls and slithering through the windows bothers him for some reason, so he turns away, pulling a black silk handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his watery eyes. The sun's too fucking bright. He should never have come here. But they'll forgive him, won't they? His family. They'll forgive him. That must be why they're calling him home.

He Apparates, and then he's there, walking through the door, shouting, "What's wrong?" All the familiar faces turn, chewing, talking—and hey, everything's fine. Everything's normal. Al and Ginny sit side by side, all smiles. On the dining room table, two hybrid flowers glow like enchanted candles.

It wasn't urgent, after all. They just wanted him home for dinner.

Harry's hand relaxes, and the mangled parchment drops to the floor. A peacock's-tail petal falls out.

Al dabs his mouth with a serviette. "Hi, Dad. Thought you'd never get here."

The blue-green petal stares up, unseeing. Harry stares back, thoughts turning in circles. The knowledge of what he's lost coils around and around him until he feels nothing else, only his bruises, his devastating mistake, his heart beating hundreds of miles away—

—where the door to the gamekeeper's hut slams flat under the weight of invading nature, bearing Snape forth strung up by his wrists, thorns at his throat, the robes ripped from his back like dishonoured wings left trampled in the grass.

By the time Harry comes running, shouting Snape's name along a trail of blood, the unfaithful serpent has been taken away and laid to rest, skinned of all hope, perfumed by the garden's incurable poison and the bitter, betraying scent of a broken promise.


End file.
